58. The soul or spirit.
Thus he could not at first have had any conception of a soul or spirit, which is an unseen thing. Savages generally may have evolved the conception of a soul or spirit as an explanation of dreams, according to the view taken by Mr. E. Clodd in Myths and Dreams,[121] Mr. Clodd shows that dreams were necessarily and invariably considered as real events, and it could not have been otherwise, as primitive man would have been unable to conceive the abstract idea of a vision or fantasy. And since during dreams the body remained immobile and quiescent, it was thought that the spirit inside the body left it and travelled independently. Hence the reluctance often evinced to waking a sleeper suddenly from fear lest the absent spirit might not have time to return to the body before its awakening and hence the man might die. Savages, not having the conception of likeness or similarity,[122] would confuse death and sleep, because the appearance of the body is similar in death and in sleep. Legends of the type of Rip Van Winkle and the Sleeping Beauty, and of heroes like King Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa lying asleep through the centuries in some remote cave or other hiding-place, from which they will one day issue forth to regenerate the world, perpetuate the primitive identification of death and sleep. And the belief long prevailed that after death the soul or spirit remained with the body in the place where it lay, leaving the body and returning to it as the spirit was held to do in sleep. The spirit was also thought to be able to quit the body and enter any other body, both during life and after death; most of the beliefs in spirit-possession and many of those about the power of witches arise from this view. The soul or spirit was commonly conceived of in concrete form; the Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus thought of it as a little mannikin inside the body. After death the Hindus often break the skull in order to allow the soul to escape. Often an insect or a stone is thought to harbour the spirit. As shown by Sir E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture,[123] the breath, the shadow and the pupil of the eye were sometimes held to be or to represent the soul or spirit. Disembodied spirits are imprisoned in a tree or hole by driving nails into the tree or ground to confine them and prevent their exit. When a man died accidentally or a woman in childbirth and fear was felt that their spirits might annoy or injure the living, a stake might be driven through the body or a cairn of stones piled over it in order to keep the ghost down and prevent it from rising and walking. The genii of the Arabian Nights were imprisoned in sealed bottles, and when the bottle was opened they appeared in a cloud of vapour.
There seems every reason to suppose, as the same author suggests, that man first thought he had a spirit himself and as a consequence held that animals, plants and inanimate objects also contained spirits. Because the belief that the human body had a spirit can easily be accounted for, but there seems to be no valid reason why man should have thought that all other visible objects also contained spirits, except that at the period when he conceived of the existence of a soul or spirit he still held them to be possessed of life and self-conscious volition like himself. But certain beliefs, such as the universal existence of life, and of its distribution all over the body and transmission by contact and eating, the common life of the species, and possibly totemism itself, appear to have been pre-animistic or prior to any conception of or belief in a soul or spirit either in man himself or in nature.